The first creative act is very often decisive for an artist’s work. For Jannis Kounellis, it took the form of a series of canvases made between 1959 and 1960 that he called L’alfabeto di Kounellis, containing implicit indications of his visual vocabulary. Indeed, although Kounellis was still a young artist he understood very early the path that he wanted to take, just the opposite of the prevailing abstract expressionism and the newly emerging Pop art. He admired Alberto Burri whose work he discovered when he arrived in Rome and found in the new generation of Italian artists – who would soon be known by the name Arte Povera – an echo of his own ideas.

It was in this context that Kounellis tackled this first series, also called Chiffre et Lettre (Figures and Letters) to which Untitled belongs. The artistic protocol he uses sets out to be as simple and neutral as possible: he uses black paint to stencil letters, figures and signs on sheets of paper or directly on to canvas in a deliberately disorganised order and that come from the urban world, billboards and other signage that surround and impregnate it. “What we must try to achieve today is unity between art and life.” the artist explained (in anInterview with Marisa Volpi, Marcatré, Rome, May 1968). Through the use of this “alphabet” of signs from everyday life, Kounellis aimed to give the initial semantic content a new formal function and alter the original meaning.

Made in 1960, Untitled provides a perfect example of this search to deconstruct the language, to empower the sign in order to reveal its essential nature. Here the figures 4 and 7 are intersected by signs – dashes and arrows – and repeated creating a kind of deliberately indecipherable music score. The artist recalled: “My first show in Rome at the La Tartaruga Gallery in 1960 was a hermetic rhythmic writing in space, the canvases were the size of the walls of my home at the time, […], stretched over the wall and painted white, then with the paint still wet I printed these letters and I sang something like a twelve-tone poem.” (A. Dickie, A conversation with Jannis Kounellis, January 2014).

While other artists of his time use typographical symbols in their work, like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg or even on the jute sacks used by Alberto Burri, Kounellis doesn’t seek to simply appropriate codes from the real world, but seeks to give them a new dimension. Indeed, in 1960 he presents an original performance in his studio around this series. Dressed in a costume made from sheets of paper covered in stencilled signs, he “sings” the figures, letters and symbols that appear on these visual poems that he composed. In this way he gave his works a spatiality that did not reduce them to mural compositions alone. This acoustic dimension in his works brings him close to the research undertaken by the father of Italian Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, for whom modern typography became a vector for poetry through his desire to liberate letters from their traditional order. It is also reminiscent of the way opened by some of the Dada artists and their exploration of the deconstruction of language, like the poet Hugo Ball who declaimed his words written in an unknown and incomprehensible language, or Raoul Hausmann who explored the question of the meaning given to typographical letters through his “phonetic poems”.

Untitled is thus an exceptional testimony to Kounellis’ search to inscribe the reality central to his work, as evidence of both his time and the docks stacked high with crates stamped with colourful figures and letters at the port of Piraeus of his childhood, and which would later take tangible form through the introduction of the subject into his work. “I search for fragments (emotional and formal), for a scattered history.” (in Vardar, No. 2, February 1982, Madrid).